“John McCain right now, he’s spending an awful lot of time talking about me,” Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., said today in Rolla, Mo. “You notice that? I haven’t seen an ad yet where he talks about what he’s gonna do. And the reason is because those folks know they don’t have any good answers, they know they’ve had their turn over the last eight years and made a mess of things. They know that you’re not real happy with them.”

Obama continued: “And so the only way they figure they’re going to win this election is if they make you scared of me. So what they’re saying is, â€˜Well, we know we’re not very good but you can’t risk electing Obama. You know, he’s new, he’s… doesn’t look like the other presidents on the currency, you know, he’s got a, he’s got a funny name.’

“I mean, that’s basically the argument — he’s too risky,” Obama said, per ABC News’ Sunlen Miller. “But think about it, what’s the bigger risk? Us deciding that we’re going to come together to bring about real change in America or continuing to do same things with the same folks in the same ways that we know have not worked? I mean, are we really going to do the same stuff that we’ve been doing over the last eight years? … That’s a risk we cannot afford. The stakes are too high.”

Obama made similar comments earlier in the day in Springfield, Mo.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but does it not seem as if Obama just said McCain and his campaign — presumably the “they” in this construct — are saying that Obama shouldn’t be elected because he’s a risk because he’s black and has a foreign-sounding name?

The Obama campaign says no, no, no, certainly not, he was talking about his “opponents” in general, writ large, the talk radio hosts and smear artists and such.

Then in Union, Mo., this evening, Obama seemed to specifically accuse McCain and the GOP of peddling racism and xenophobia.

Obama said that “John McCain and the Republicans, they don’t have any new ideas, that’s why they’re spending all their time talking about me. I mean, you haven’t heard a positive thing out of that campaign in … in a month. All they do is try to run me down and you know, you know this in your own life. If somebody doesn’t have anything nice to say about anybody, that means they’ve got some problems of their own. So they know they’ve got no new ideas, they know they’re dredging up all the stale old stuff they’ve been peddling for the last eight, 10 years.

“But, since they don’t have any new ideas the only strategy they’ve got in this election is to try to scare you about me. They’re going to try to say that I’m a risky guy, they’re going to try to say, ‘Well, you know, he’s got a funny name and he doesn’t look like all the presidents on the dollar bills and the five dollar bills and, and they’re going to send out nasty emails.

Lemme see.Â Who was the last guy reminding people that “he doesn’t look like” past presidents? Well that would be Barack Obama, during his performance in Berlin last week:

“I know that I don’t look like the Americans who’ve previously spoken in this great city.”

Tapper continues:

There’s a lot of racist xenophobic crap out there. But not only has McCain not peddled any of it, he’s condemned it.

Back in February, McCain apologized for some questionable comments made by a local radio host. In April, he condemned the North Carolina Republican Party’s ad featuring images of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright.

With one possible exception, I’ve never seen McCain or those under his control playing the race card or making fun of Obama’s name — or even mentioning Obama’s full name, for that matter!

(The one exception was in March when McCain suspended a low-level campaign staffer for sending out to a small group of friends a link to a video that attempts to tie Obama not only to Wright but to the black power movement, rappers Public Enemy and Malcolm X.)

[…]

What I have not seen is it come from McCain or his campaign in such a way to merit the language Obama used today. Pretty inflammatory.

Not to mention all the “he’s old”Â implications coming directly from Obama, some of his supporters,Â and hisÂ surrogates like John Kerry saying that McCain is “confused” on various statements he’s made.

Bbbbut he’s supposed to be above the politics of the past, against the “same ol’ Washington game-playing,” right?Â Â I think of all the complaints coming from the left about how McCain is supposedly no longer running a “civil” campaign against Obama, and then I see this stuff and wonder, “Is ANYONE on the left paying attention to what their own candidate says and does under the guise of ‘change'”?

I agree that the Celeb commercial is pretty weak, but if it’s racist, then Obama has defined the term so far downward as to have no meaning at all.Â Obama is the one playing on fear; he wants people to be afraid to criticize him at all.Â He wants to stifle dissent by forcing people to defend themselves against a smear of racism in any and all contexts of criticism, which will have the effect of shutting people up.

That’s not exactly a commendable quality for a President.Â If we can’t criticize him now without being called racists, what would it be like when he runs the government?

Tapper gets this exactly right.Â Too bad the rest of the media hasn’t realized the potential danger in this Obama impulse.

“What Barack Obama was talking about was that he didn’t get here after spending decades in Washington,” Gibbs said.

Spintastic!

Update 3 – 4:11 PM: Hot Air is following the latest developments and has the Obama campaign’s latest lame spin.Â I can’t wait to hear the words come out of Obama’s own mouth denying he’s played the race card.

While its certainly okay to check the veracity of McCain’s campaign blitz against Obama, to go as far as to suggest that images of young celebrity sex-kittens juxtaposed to a Democratic-sponsored campaign speech by a black American presidential candidate in modern-day Berlin is a reprise of the 1000-Year Reich, is patently absurd.

Obama’s gasoline bill is going to go up — that hissing sound is the air coming out of the tires on his campaign.

He reminds me of Chavez in a way. Chavez keeps telling his country that America is going to invade any minute now and using that to excuse his own high handedness. Obama keeps telling us that he will be the victim of racial attacks from McCain any moment now… see what I mean?